Perception Point: Identifying Critical Learning Periods in Speech for Bilingual Networks
This work addresses the problem of understanding developmental speech acquisition in bilingual contexts, but it is incremental as it applies existing theories to computational models without major methodological breakthroughs.
The paper investigates critical learning periods in speech perception by comparing cognitive psychology theories with deep neural lip-reading models, finding a strong correlation between the two across English and Mandarin datasets.
Recent studies in speech perception have been closely linked to fields of cognitive psychology, phonology, and phonetics in linguistics. During perceptual attunement, a critical and sensitive developmental trajectory has been examined in bilingual and monolingual infants where they can best discriminate common phonemes. In this paper, we compare and identify these cognitive aspects on deep neural-based visual lip-reading models. We conduct experiments on the two most extensive public visual speech recognition datasets for English and Mandarin. Through our experimental results, we observe a strong correlation between these theories in cognitive psychology and our unique modeling. We inspect how these computational models develop similar phases in speech perception and acquisitions.